Scouted at 14, she made her breakthrough with a Corinne Day shoot for
The Face
but found the whole thing excruciating.

"I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, 'If you don't do it, then we're not going to book you again'. So I'd lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it," she said.

Moss became a global star in 1992 when she appeared with Mark Wahlberg in a Calvin Klein campaign shot by Herb Ritts, but the experience pushed her over the edge.

"I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts," Moss said.

"It didn't feel like me at all. I felt really bad straddling this buff guy. I didn't like it.

"I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor and he said, 'I'll give you some Valium,' and Francesca Sorrenti [Moss's friend and mother of Mario Sorrenti], thank God, said, 'You're not taking that'.

"It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There's a massive pressure to do what you have to do.

"I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird - a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn't like it. But it was work and I had to do it."

Moss said she felt secure only when she met Hollywood actor Johnny Depp. The couple got together in 1994 but split in 1998, and Moss was left heartbroken.

She told the magazine: "There's nobody that's ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said. Like if I said, 'What do I do?' - he'd tell me. And that's what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust.

"Nightmare. Years and years of crying. Oh, the tears..."

Moss, 38, became the poster girl for 'heroin chic' in the 1990s, a tag she struggled to shift.

She denied ever taking the drug and said her waif-like appearance was down to a lack of food. "At that time I was staying at a B&B in Milan, and you'd get home from work and there was no food. You'd get to work in the morning, there was no food.

"Nobody took you out for lunch when I started. Carla Bruni took me out for lunch once. She was really nice. Otherwise, you don't get fed."

"He told me 'never complain, never explain'. That's why I don't use Twitter and things like that. I don't want people to know what is true all the time and that's what keeps the mystery."

Moss also reveals how the constant paparazzi culture has defined her style, which sees her mainly opt for grey or black clothes. "If you do a different look every day, they're going to be waiting for the next look, and then it's a paparazzi shot. Whereas if you just wear the same thing, then they get bored and leave you alone."

The full interview is in the December issue of
Vanity Fair
, out on Friday